How Obama Can Fix Another Bush Disaster: The War on Workers

At year's end, President Bush and his spinmeisters, including the First Lady, defended his legacy from Iraq to Katrina. But scholars and progressives were united in their view that President Bush is one of of the worst Presidents in history.

Yet even as pundits have justly focused on the cataclysmic trifecta of Iraq, Katrina and the $7 trillion economic meltdown, there was another calamity that combined free-market zealotry, incompetence and indifference to public health and safety: the Bush Administration's War on Workers.

In its own six-part review of the "good news/bad news" year in labor, the AFL-CIO Now blog labeled Bush's government "the most anti-worker administration in U.S. history."

On virtually every front, the Labor Department that was supposed to protect workers' lives and paychecks did practically nothing to stop 6,000 workers from being killed on the job each year and prevent an estimated $19 billion from being stolen through corporate wage theft of overtime and minimum wage payments. As David Madland and Karla Walter of the Center for American Progress Action Fund pointed out recently: